1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a storage apparatus and a conversion board. This invention is suited for use in a storage apparatus that uses 3.5-inch hard disk drives as disk units.
2. Description of Related Art
Lately, storage apparatuses that can offer increased total capacity and improved data access speed and reliability at the same time by managing a plurality of disk units, such as hard disk drives (herein after also referred to as HDDs), based on RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) have been put into practical use.
In this type of storage apparatus, a high-speed data transfer system called Fibre Channel is normally used to transfer data to disk units, and 3.5-inch HDDs utilizing the above Fibre Channel are mainstream disk units installed in this type of storage apparatus.
Meanwhile, another data transfer system called SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), which realizes a high processing speed second to Fibre Channel and has a much larger total number of connectable disk units than in Fibre Channel, has started to be used, and, instead of 3.5-inch HDDs utilizing Fibre Channel, inexpensive 2.5-inch HDDs utilizing SAS are expected to be the mainstream disk units installed in storage apparatuses in the future.
Under the current circumstances, an optimal design is a storage apparatus using both 3.5-inch HDDs and 2.5-inch HDDs in combination, taking into account the desired processing speed and price.
Regarding techniques for installing two or more types of HDD in a storage apparatus, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. H06-084338 and Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. H08-137631 disclose techniques for installing a plurality of 2.5-inch HDDs in a storage apparatus case having 5.25-inch HDDs installed therein.